I run CachyOS on my desktop. I host Homepage for myself on a home server. This is reached at home.mydomain.tld. Pihole on my local network catches that request and points it at my local nginx, which reverse proxies me to the homepage.
Now, I set this all up a while back and it all worked totally fine for several weeks. Then, about a week or so ago, for some reason almost every, but not every time I boot my PC, home.mydomain.tld gives me a “cannot be reached” error in my browser… until I run systemctl restart NetworkManager and then it works completely normally.
Can anyone help me troubleshoot why oh why that would suddenly be a thing? Does anyone have suggestions of a way I can troubleshoot a permanent fix to this so that I don’t have to restart NetworkManager almost every boot?
So I would start with checking if the request is reaching PiHole.
Next time it breaks, before restarting networkmanager, go check the pihole requests log and see if your DNS queries are even showing up there.
If they are, what does pihole show it’s returning for the query, is it the correct IP?
If that’s working properly then I would check if you can ping the server by IP directly, make sure that connection is working.
I will check this next time it happens (I’m very confident that will be later today lol)
Out of curiosity, can you think of a reason why a problem with Pihole would be fixed by restarting my NetworkManager? I was certain the problem had to be on my pc.
I don’t think it’s a problem with PiHole realistically, it sounds more like for some reason your DNS requests are not getting to PiHole.
Can confirm, when this happens my requests from desktop are not getting to pi-hole. Works from my phone without issue.
Nice, narrowing it down!
Next thing I would check is your configured DNS servers on the desktop, it needs to have only the pihole IP, if it has any other servers configured that is likely the issue.
Also worth pinging the pihole IP next time it’s not working, to check if it’s actually a networking issue instead of a DNS issue.